Cloud native application development has evolved to an extent where it is the preferred way to build business applications. With multi cloud environments being dynamic and complex, organizations tend to deploy disparate tools as suited for a specific security requirement. However, collaborating with these multiple point tools can make managing risk difficult. It can lead to a lack of communication, creating chaos in terms of integration, information flows, and comprehensive visibility, resulting in data silos and risk blind spots.

In the Innovation Insight for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms report, Gartner’s Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) category was introduced to create consistency and uniformity. It is a collaborative cloud security framework combining Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and CI/CD Infrastructure as Code (IaC) security into a single, seamless and unified solution to secure hybrid multicloud workloads.

Further, Gartner also estimates that by 2025 over 95% of new cloud workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, which is up from 30% in 2021. With its capabilities of detecting, prioritizing, and remediating potential threats and vulnerabilities, CNAPP facilitates the security practices for DevSecOps process. It provides a combination of multiple tool chaining and service functions that offer continuous monitoring of application security and compliance posture throughout the entire CI/CD, application development and deployment lifecycle.

Hybrid Multicloud Security Challenges

Organizations are leveraging public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to accelerate the pace of innovation and streamline operations. Many are implementing hybrid multicloud architectures to optimize choice, costs or availability. Cloud security needs to keep up the pace of safeguarding highly dynamic, ephemeral cloud infrastructure. Here are a few security challenges DevSecOps and cloud security teams are likely to experience:

Hybrid Multicloud Security Challenges

Ensuring security and compliance of a hybrid multicloud environment differs significantly from traditional data center security practices. With boundaries blurring between security responsibilities and deployed disparate point security tools, distributed apps and APIs are being exploited due to blind spots, data silos and lack of knowledge of all services. It is extremely challenging to maintain holistic visibility and controls over security silos and mitigate zero-day risks among complex tools and error-prone third party service artifact integration.

Simply not feasible to install agents on cloud assets leading to security gaps and misconfigurations

Legacy agent-based cloud security solution creates performance impact and delay in risk management. Security teams spend relentless resources installing, configuring, and maintaining agents. With the increasing number of tools and services, it’s inevitable to have misconfigurations caused by human errors or unintentional actions.

Impossible to pin and regulate non-compliant processes during deployment checks

Auditors need proof of enforcing controls over sensitive data in isolated cloud-native workloads and reports on restricting access to specific compliance regulated resources defined by PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, NIST RMF, and other custom frameworks.


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Security teams need to be able to identify, quantify risks and analyze threats among heterogeneous applications, workloads, networks, data, and incident reports. It is essential to take the guesswork out of your cloud security practices and streamline the compliance validation and regulation checks in real time on hundreds of different applications from a single platform.

How CNAPP Benefits Hybrid Multicloud Environments

CNAPP gives security teams the ability to monitor, identify, and respond to possible hybrid multicloud security threats and vulnerabilities in real time. CNAPP integrates numerous security tools and disparate functions into a single software solution to reduce complexity and provides the visibility to uncover flaws early in the application lifecycle.

• Enhancing Visibility and Quantifying Risks - Provides total awareness of the risks connected with your cloud infrastructure by ensuring comprehensive visibility and integrating numerous cloud security and compliance capabilities into a unified solution. It enables security teams to quantify and respond to threats in the hybrid multicloud environment.

• Consolidated Cloud Security Solution - Enables end-to-end cloud infrastructure security solution that eliminates the necessity for information to be exchanged across platforms and software solutions. It combines all cloud-related reporting, scanning, and threat detection into a single software solution, eliminating human error involved with managing numerous tools and applications and shortening the time it takes for teams to be alerted if a threat is found.

• Secure Software Development - Enables end-to-end cloud infrastructure security solution that eliminates the necessity for information to be exchanged across platforms and software solutions. It combines all cloud-related reporting, scanning, and threat detection into a single software solution, eliminating human error involved with managing numerous tools and applications and shortening the time it takes for teams to be alerted if a threat is found.

• Container Registry and Configuration File Scanning: - checks early in your CI/CD pipeline, and continuously scans Kubernetes registries and serverless functions with real time visibility into vulnerability and security posture with to-date threat intelligence of affected packages and applications.

• Securing Shift Left at Build Time: Secures your release pipeline by detecting changes to your codebase and automating the DevOps process accordingly.

• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) - The most severe cloud breaches are triggered by client misconfiguration, mismanagement, and errors. CSPM allows for compliance monitoring, DevOps integration, incident response, risk assessment, and risk visualization. It is critical for security and risk management executives to enable CSPM systems to proactively detect and resolve data threats.

• Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) - CWPP offers consistent visibility, continuous threat monitoring and detection for workloads running in hybrid data center architectures, including on-premises, physical and virtual machines (VMs), and different public cloud infrastructures. This covers container-based application architectures as well.

• Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) - CIEM is designed to consistently manage privilege in complex and dynamic cloud environments. It applies the Principle of Least Privilege access to cloud infrastructure and security teams with fine-grained control over cloud permissions and full visibility into service entitlements.

Implementing CNAPP with Caveonix

Caveonix CNAPP is the best-in-class security architecture that delivers complete end-to-end cloud security via a single holistic platform. It unifies functionality for otherwise discrete capabilities such as:

• Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
• Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)
• Infrastructure as Code (IAC) Security
• Support for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) via DevSecOps

Continuous and Complete Visibility

You cannot secure what you cannot see. Caveonix CNAPP solution has a built-in cloud asset discovery technology, ActiveAssetSync™, which enables near real-time discovery of assets upon deployment and spin-up of assets in your cloud environment. This results in the elimination of blind spots due to the continuous and complete visibility across all your clouds simultaneously in a single cloud security platform.

Security Compliance through DevSecOps Lifecycle

For continuous compliance checks and actionable insights,  Caveonix Neural-Insight™ Engine continuously analyzes your hybrid multicloud environment to identify targeted vulnerabilities in applications, and IaC.  The CNAPP platform from Caveonix provides continuous security and compliance throughout the entire cloud-native application lifecycle including design, deployment, and operational phases. It reduces misconfiguration and mismanagement of rapidly developed and deployed cloud-native applications. It continuously scans cloud IaC, container, and configurations to discover security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Scans are performed continuously for runtime elements and in your CI/CD pipeline.

Upon discovery of security findings, the platform can provide automatic near real-time remediation with DefenseBot™, our proprietary implementation of robotic process automation (RPA) technology. It mitigates risks faster than any human remediation or semi-automated process.

Caveonix CNAPP Development Phase Capabilities

Static Application Security Tasting (SAST)

Software Composition Analysis

Pre-deployment common vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) Scanning

Pre-deployment Secret Exposure Scanning

Pre-deployment Attack Path Analysis

Caveonix CNAPP Infrastructure Security Capabilities

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Scanning

Network Configuration and Security Policy

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Managment (CIEM)

Kubernetes security Posture Management (KSPM)

Cloud Security Posture Management

Caveonix CNAPP Runtime Protection Capabilities

Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP)

Network Segmentation

Runtime Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) Scanning

“>Runtime Secrets Exposure Scanning

Unified Approach to Security and Compliance

Caveonix CNAPP solution enables your organization to reduce security tool fatigue, devops maintenance cost, and complexity and gain a holistic view of security and compliance across their hybrid multicloud environment. Organizations can replace the myriad of disparate solutions from several vendors with a unified platform for security, compliance and governance, streamlining their approach and realizing cost-savings in the process.

Want to learn more about how we can secure your organization’s hybrid multicloud estates?

Book a demo today to see Caveonix’s CNAPP solution in action.